G.O.P. Senate Leaders Avert Debt Ceiling Crisis

WASHINGTON — It was a moment of real drama in a chamber known for its somnambulism. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, counted votes on his hand, at one point holding up three fingers as he searched for the remaining votes. Senator John Cornyn of Texas, his No. 2, paced the Senate floor.

What happened next would determine whether their party would again be blamed for triggering a crisis. But when it was clear they had no choice, the two Republicans, who face primary challenges in the November midterm elections, stepped forward in tandem on Wednesday to break their party’s filibuster.

In a nearby cloakroom, an animated Senator John McCain of Arizona pleaded with fellow Republicans to support their leaders, while others directed ire at Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who prompted the showdown, and at one point stood alone as his colleagues gathered in a tight circle to weigh their options. Eventually, others followed the leaders — 12 Republicans in all — and the potential catastrophe was no more.

It also represented a public rebuke of the Tea Party wing by Republican Party elders in what has been a sometimes fierce intramural struggle.

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What Is the Debt Ceiling?

During the October 2013 government shutdown, The Times’s David Leonhardt explained the debt limit and how a failure to raise it could have affected the economy both at home and abroad.

By A.J. Chavar and Alyssa Kim on Publish Date October 14, 2013.
Photo by Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press.
Watch in Times Video »

Congress gave final approval on Wednesday to raising the nation’s borrowing authority, the first “clean” increase since 2009. It followed Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio delivering a House vote on Tuesday on the backs of Democratic votes, as Republican leaders stood up to absorb the blows from the Tea Party elements in their party.

For Mr. Boehner, the challenge was putting a debt ceiling increase up for a vote, without preconditions. For Senate Republican leaders, it was to actually cast the votes. In both chambers, their actions provided crucial political cover to their colleagues, who then were free to vote against the measure while also escaping blame in the midterm elections for the harm to the economy that a debt default would have wrought.

“McConnell and Cornyn voted in a responsible way under the circumstances, and hopefully people will understand that McConnell, especially, in an incredibly tough race, the toughest Republican race in the country, had the courage to vote the way the vast majority understood needed to occur,” said Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, who voted with his leadership. “I’ve got to tell you I think it shows tremendous courage on his part.”

The Senate voted 67 to 31 to break the filibuster, with 12 Republicans joining all 55 Democrats on the most critical vote of the day. The bill to lift the debt ceiling until March 2015 then passed 55 to 43, in an entirely party-line vote.

Republican leaders — from Mr. Boehner to Mr. McConnell and their lieutenants in both chambers — collectively decided that they needed to quickly dispose of the debt ceiling fight in order to maintain the political focus on President Obama, his health care law and a souring political atmosphere for the president’s party.

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Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, on his way to a vote Wednesday, forced a filibuster over the debt ceiling increase.Credit
Gabriella Demczuk/The New York Times

The government faced a potentially catastrophic default on Feb. 27, and had Congress headed home for its weeklong Washington’s Birthday break without addressing it, congressional Republicans again would have become the focus of a countdown toward disaster. Having suffered through October’s 16-day government shutdown, Republican leaders understood their party’s fortunes in the coming midterm elections could be determined by how long the debt-ceiling showdown dragged on.

“That’s leadership,” said Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma. “Speaker Boehner made sure his party wasn’t put at risk and the country wasn’t put in peril. By taking the pain himself, there’s a lot of gratitude in the conference.”

Conservatives were left infuriated by what they saw as an abdication of fiscal responsibility, and began calling for the resignation of top congressional Republicans. Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, said his group would redouble its efforts to replace the top two Republican leaders.

“Between the grass-roots frustration with Mitch McConnell and with John Boehner, it’s the perfect storm,” Mr. Kibbe said.

Mr. Cruz, who had forced the filibuster, seeking deficit reduction talks in exchange for the debt ceiling increase, declared, “Today was a classic victory for Washington establishment interests, and the people who lost were the American people who find the fiscal and economic condition of this nation even worse because of a lack of leadership.”

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Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, heading to the Senate floor on Wednesday to vote on the debt ceiling bill.Credit
Gabriella Demczuk/The New York Times

Had Mr. Cruz not mounted the filibuster, the debt-ceiling increase could have passed the Senate with only Democratic votes — an outcome many Republicans wanted. But he was unapologetic, even as many of his colleagues fumed that he had single-handedly forced his own leaders to take perhaps the most difficult vote of this election season.

“It should have been a very easy vote,” Mr. Cruz said. “In my view, every Senate Republican should have stood together and said what every one of us tells our constituents back home, which is that we will not go along with raising the debt ceiling while doing nothing to address the underlying spending problem.”

After the vote, Mr. McCain joked that he was only talking about the stormy winter weather.

“I’ve never been any good at twisting arms, which is one of the many reasons why I was never president of the United States,” he said. But he added praise for Mr. McConnell: “Seriously, he knows that he’s the leader — he’s the elected Republican leader — and that it was up to him to cast the right vote,” Mr. McCain said.

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President Obama, a winner in the showdown, has promised to sign the debt ceiling increase.

“We welcome the news that Congress has acted to meet its responsibility” by lifting the debt limit, Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew said in a statement. He said that the action “will provide certainty and stability to businesses and financial markets.”

For Republican leaders, the debt ceiling showdown gave them a chance to replay the government shutdown — but with a different ending. Then as now, outside conservative groups and their Tea Party allies in Congress pressed for confrontation, but with no clear path away from political disaster. This time, Republican leaders did not take the bait.

“We can put the country through two weeks of turmoil or we can put this behind us,” Mr. Corker said. “The fact is, the House could only pass a clean debt ceiling. We knew what the outcome was going to be.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 13, 2014, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: G.O.P. Senate Leaders Avert Debt Ceiling Crisis. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe